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Rh fidence overwhelmed him as he heard this voice, sounding strange to him. He closed his lips. But in a little while he heard himself again speaking aloud, and he was cursing. According to the legends of prison life, this is a sign of coming insanity; so, crouching in the centre of the walled-in darkness, he occupied his mind by counting his copper.

He reduced to days his sentence; then to days his copper; then to days his sentence minus his copper; then to days his sentence minus his copper minus the days already served. He did this many times, by different processes.

But insensibly he passed from this, and a vision came to him. As he crouched here in the centre of this cubical compressed blackness, he saw suddenly the captain’s flat-topped desk, and the knife upon it. He saw this sharply—its gray colour, spotted with brown stain, its heavy back, with the file-rasp still upon it, the keen blade, the needle-like point; he could feel its weight, its well-balanced weight, that admitted of cracking a skull or carving out a rib. Rh